Arts & Culture | Film

The first image one sees in David Fisher’s new documentary “Six Million and One” is a crumbling stone doorway bridged by a spider web. The visual irony is striking, with the rough yellow stone breaking down, the wispy lacework sturdy and undamaged. That irony is, perhaps, at the center of Fisher’s film.

Bob Fass, who has hosted the pioneering “free-form” radio show “Radio Unnameable” on New York’s WBAI-FM since 1963, is a vivid and living reminder of a certain generation of Jewish radicals both cultural and political. “Radio Unnameable,” the motion picture that opens on Sept. 19, is a loving portrait of Fass and, quite consciously, of that generation.

The Jewish people have a long tradition of interest in the occult and the supernatural — not that you’d know it from Hollywood’s version. Wonder-working rabbis animated the inanimate; the souls of the newly dead took over the bodies of the living. We did werewolves and demons — the whole haunted nine yards. (OK, Jewish tales are a little weak on vampires, although it’s not a stretch to read the Dracula story as anti-Semitic — another subject for another movie review.) From the legends of Lilith to the short fiction of I.B.

Coming-of-age movies are easier to find these days than political consultants, and about as useful. Young directors trying to follow the advice to “write/film what you know” only know about coming of age (or old movies and TV). Boomers trying desperately to cling to their threadbare youths replay first love on camera to little effect. Unless your story really does have something to offer beyond the sentimental clichés of the genre, you should keep your coming-of-age story to yourself.

Zionism and the Holocaust are, obviously, the two central facts of 20th-century Jewish history. Each is, in its way, intimately linked with the history of cinema. Theodor Herzl’s awakening as a Jew is usually dated to his covering the Dreyfus Trial in 1894-’95, the year in which the Lumière brothers offered the first public screening of motion pictures. Both the Nazis and their opponents used film as a key element in their propaganda; film footage of the death camps has always been one of the most powerful forms of testimony to the Shoah’s horrors.